In the past, traditional roadside billboards have been covered with printed paper or printed plastic sheeting. Current plastic sheeting is either polyester scrim coated with a compounded PVC or woven polyethylene which may or may not require a printable coating layer commonly composed of inorganic powders such as antimony oxide, titanium oxide and/or calcium carbonate.
These types of plastic sheeting are then printed with an advertisement or message using solvent, water and UV-based inkjet digital printing technology.
These prints are used to cover over 400,000 billboard faces in the US which can be changed frequently, resulting in an estimated several hundred million square feet of material annually which must be printed, shipped, installed, removed, discarded and replaced.
Because billboards are located outside, they are subject to varying and, at times, extreme weather conditions, including sun, wind, rain, snow, ice, tornadoes, hurricanes. Older billboard structures may be made of wood and new billboard structures made of metal. These structures are also subject to wear and tear from the repeated attaching and removing of advertisements. As a result, the billboard structure may experience damage over time which can, in turn, impart physical damage to an installed advertisement. Such damage may lessen the life of an advertisement requiring the billboard owner to replace the advertisement at its cost or compelling the owner to use more robust, heavy duty material for the advertisement which adds additional cost.